alyaza

I made a website. It’s called One Million Chessboards. It has one million chessboards on it.

Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns. You can move between boards.

What

Well last year I made this game called One Million Checkboxes.

It was a pretty fun time! So I thought I’d do something like this again.

I worked really hard on this one. I hope you like it.

How

This was the most technically challenging thing that I’ve worked on in a long time. I’m going to save a full technical writeup until I see how my decisions pan out, since I think there’s a decent chance I’ll need to make a lot of changes.

But I’ll summarize a few things for you.

• Unlike One Million Checkboxes, I designed this for scale
• The game runs on a single server (!)
• The board is stored fully in-memory; it’s a 2D array of 64 million uint64s
• The backend is written in go. This is my first go project.
• I use a single writer thread, tons of reader threads, and coordinate access to the board with a mutex
• The frontend optimistically applies all moves you make immediately. It then builds up a dependency graph of the moves you’ve made, and backs them out if it receives a conflicting update before the server acks your move.

That last part - optimistic move application with what games people sometimes call “rollback” - is about 1,600 lines of code that took me a ~7 days of fulltime work to write. I don’t remember the last time I wrestled with a problem that hard!

Vultures have an image problem. Seen as ugly and associated with death, they are among the least loved animals in the world. But conservationists in Africa are trying to change that.

They’ve launched an effort to save endangered vultures by trying to put a dollar figure on their incredible value.

A recent report by the BirdLife International conservation organization estimated that vultures are worth $1.8 billion a year to certain ecosystems in southern Africa, which might surprise anyone not familiar with the clean-up, pest control and anti-poaching work performed by one of the most efficient scavengers on the planet.

“They are not up there on the pretty scale. And they are not popular. But we know they are very useful,” said Fadzai Matsvimbo, an extinction prevention coordinator at BirdLife International.

For many gamers, this week's release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has provided a good excuse to revisit a well-remembered RPG classic from years past. For others, it's provided a good excuse to catch up on a well-regarded game that they haven't gotten around to playing in the nearly two decades since its release.

I'm in that second group. While I've played a fair amount of Skyrim (on platforms ranging from the Xbox 360 to VR headsets) and Starfield, I've never taken the time to go back to the earlier Bethesda Game Studios RPGs. As such, my impressions of Oblivion before this Remaster have been guided by old critical reactions and the many memes calling attention to the game's somewhat janky engine.

Playing through the first few hours of Oblivion Remastered this week, without the benefit of nostalgia, I can definitely see why Oblivion made such an impact on RPG fans in 2006. But I also see all the ways that the game can feel a bit dated after nearly two decades of advancements in genre design.

Members of the Indigenous Waorani village of Kiwaro looked skyward as a helicopter hovered over the rainforest canopy in the center of Ecuador and landed in a nearby clearing. Out stepped government officials, there to inform the community about an impending auction of oil rights on their land.

The Ecuadorian government announced earlier, in November 2011 from the capital city Quito, that it would open up for drilling millions of hectares of Amazon rainforest—including the ancestral territories of Waorani communities like Kiwaro.

According to court documents, the officials’ time in the village was brief. There was no detailed explanation of what oil extraction entailed. No discussion about oil operations’ negative impacts. The community’s official leaders, known as pikenani, weren’t present at some meetings. And officials spoke in Spanish, not the community’s Waotetero language. Across the region slated for drilling, dozens of other consultation processes followed similar patterns—if they happened at all. Later analyses showed that the government only spoke with about 7 percent of people affected by the planned operations.

Neither the Ecuadorian Consulate in Washington, D.C., nor representatives from the Ecuadorian Ministries of Environment or Energy and Mines responded to requests for comment. But officials have previously said they complied with government regulations and acted in good faith.

With extractive industry pressures intensifying worldwide, Indigenous groups, governments and businesses have been pushing courts to clarify ambiguities in the laws.

Today, it’s not just oil companies knocking at communities’ doors. Mining—legal and illegal—has exploded in the Ecuadorian Amazon and beyond. Indigenous lands hold more than half of the world’s minerals used in low carbon and modern-day technologies like computers and cell phones. Those lands also are home to more than a third of the world’s remaining intact forests, and conservation efforts have emerged as another threat. Some carbon schemes and national parks have had links to forced displacements and other human rights violations.

In theory, FPIC acts as a safeguard against these and other abuses. But in practice, Indigenous leaders and outside experts say governments frequently carry out performative meetings, with rushed or bare-bones presentations made to select representatives.

“There is a tendency of governments to want a tick box,” said Cathal Doyle, legal and human rights program coordinator at the U.K.-based nonprofit Forest Peoples Programme.

Governments’ emphasis on speed and efficiency can undermine the purpose of FPIC, experts like Doyle say.

Consultations must be adapted to each community’s distinct customs, many of which rely on consensus-based decision-making processes that can take months or more than a year, said S. James Anaya, a former United Nations special rapporteur on Indigenous peoples’ rights.

Doyle’s work allows him to see how often the right to free, prior and informed consultation is fully complied with. “It’s rare,” he said.

There are, he added, some instances where communities’ decisions to withhold consent for actions or projects have been respected, but those have often been at the end of a long struggle with a huge amount of advocacy and mobilization.

To assume hundreds of millions of people think alike or live under the same circumstances is a mistake, Indigenous leaders and researchers say. So too is the presumption that all Indigenous communities use the FPIC process to oppose extractive industries.

Some communities have used consultations to negotiate economic benefits, jobs, land protections and environmental safeguards, said Anaya, who also served as dean of the University of Colorado Boulder Law School.

“In much of the world, it’s assumed that Indigenous peoples are never interested in development—and that’s a myth,” Anaya said. What matters, he added, is that Indigenous peoples have a choice, and that agreements with governments or private companies are made on “just and equitable terms.”

Nine people have been killed and multiple others injured after the driver of a black SUV slammed into a crowd Saturday evening at a street festival in Vancouver celebrating the contributions of the Filipino Canadian community, police say.

It happened shortly after 8 p.m. PT, a few blocks from East 41st Avenue and Fraser Street, where the Lapu Lapu Day Block Party was winding down, after drawing up to 100,000 people through the day.

Interim Vancouver Police Chief Steve Rai says a 30-year-old Vancouver man is now in custody.

In a statement read Sunday morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney said more than 20 people were injured.

Carney said Canadians are heartbroken at what "police are describing as a car-ramming attack" that happened during "an occasion to gather and to celebrate the vibrancy of the Filipino-Canadian community."

Skype, the online video-calling service, is shutting down in May after more than two decades of service. For those of a certain generation, Skype changed everything.

Before it launched in 2003, making international calls 📱 was prohibitively expensive and few viable digital alternatives existed. Skype offered users a cheap and easy way to call anyone in the world, skirting the draconian landline industry. When Skype added video calls a few years later, it felt as if the future had arrived: Students used Skype to stay connected to families back home 🤙, international friendships were born 🤝, and a generation of cross-border relationships began ❤️ — or ended 💔 — over the service. By the late 2000s, Skype was so ubiquitous that its name became a verb, much like Xerox and Google. Its bouncy ringtones and audio notifications were iconic. 🎶

At its peak, Skype had about 300 million users around the world. But it was a product of the desktop era, and as users went mobile, Skype lost its edge to upstarts like WhatsApp and FaceTime. Today, the app is forgotten on most phones and computers, particularly in the West. ⏰

The platform still has dedicated pockets of users in countries like Turkey, Russia, India, and the Philippines, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments,” Microsoft said in a blog post announcing its imminent shutdown. 😴

Before Skype goes the way of other early internet icons like AOL Instant Messenger and Friendster, Rest of World readers shared their favorite memories of the service. Here are their stories. 🙇

When the tenants come together, though, that is a different story. Recent years have seen a surge in tenant union organizing. Unions in places like Kansas City, Louisville, Los Angeles, Bozeman, Montana, and Chicago have formed and won concessions from landlords. Last year, many of the tenant unions came together to form a national Tenant Union Federation.

No one understands the potential for collective action better than tenants who are also members of labor unions. Christina Jackson is in that category. A home healthcare worker for 40 years, Jackson is a member of SEIU Local 105 and serves on the local’s standards board for home healthcare workers. “Once I became a member of SEIU, I found my voice,” she said.

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

If left unchallenged, a rising wave of white nationalism in many parts of the globe could threaten the progress that has been made in science — and broader society — towards a more equitable world1.

As scientists and members of the public, we must push back against this threat — by modifying approaches to genetics education, advocating for science, establishing and leading diverse research teams and ensuring that studies embrace and build on the insights obtained about human variation.

The maker of cryptic block-seeding puzzler Starseed Pilgrim has announced a new game in which you are invited to do the unspeakable and "kill gameplay". The End Of Gameplay will be an exploratory 2D platformer according to the tags on its Steam page but anyone who has played the work of creator Droqen might predict those labels to prove looser than a toddler's shoelace. Enjoyers of obscure and poetic wanderings in minimalist spaces will probably be happy with the trailer below.

The creator describes it as "like Starseed Pilgrim, but only all the parts that nobody told me they cared about". This is a strong pitch but in what direction I cannot tell. Starseed Pilgrim was a mysterious blockbuilding platformer released back in the hellsands of 2013, in which you had to plant various seeds and discover their effects to go... somewhere? I never quite got it, to be honest. But that's okay, I'm not alone.

We at RPS regularly and viciously kill the word "gameplay" every time it appears, like a relentless weed in our garden of text (I am strongly restraining myself right now). But that's just a word, the visible tuft of a greater problem. The concept of gameplay remains stubborn, its roots spreading deep under the soil of the games industry like a vast and undefinable mycorrhizal network. It is this which Droqen seeks to destroy. This mission is a dangerous folly. I am interested to see how it goes.